Salesforce.com Winter '08, SAS Marketing and CRM, Infor CRM and Teradata, Emovendo's PageVester, Informatica's AppEx Entry

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David Sims
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Salesforce.com Winter '08, SAS Marketing and CRM, Infor CRM and Teradata, Emovendo's PageVester, Informatica's AppEx Entry

By David Sims
David at firstcoffee d*t biz
 
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is It’s A Beautiful Day’s absolutely blazing live album Creed Of Love. It almost convinces you that the violin is a rock ‘n’ roll instrument — at least a violin in David LaFlamme’s hands:
 
On-demand CRM vendor Salesforce.com has unveiled Salesforce Winter ‘08, which will expand Salesforce from four to six major application product lines with two new applications — Salesforce Content and Salesforce Ideas.
 
Marc Benioff and other company officials unveiled the new product at Dreamforce 07 in San Francisco.
 
These two new applications will “deliver Salesforce to every employee in the enterprise and empower customers to take advantage of the wisdom of crowds,” Salesforce.com officials said, adding that “the 24th generation of Salesforce will further extend salesforce.com’s leadership in the CRM market by using the Force.com platform to bring Web 2.0 community-based technologies to the entire suite of Salesforce CRM applications.”
 
The Salesforce Winter ‘08 release will expand the Salesforce product line from the original four CRM applications of Salesforce SFA, Salesforce Service & Support, Salesforce Marketing and Salesforce Partner Relationship Management to include Salesforce Content and Salesforce Ideas.
 
Salesforce.com officials, who claim to have “created the Software-as-a-Service category,” now say they have “created the Platform- as-a-Service category,” and are “the first multi-application, multi-category company in the on-demand industry.”
 
Salesforce Content gives users Web 2.0 technologies to deliver Content Management-as-a-Service. “By using the wisdom of crowds and the contributions of every employee, Salesforce Content brings the power of on-demand to the unstructured data within an enterprise,” company officials say. Using Web 2.0 technologies such as tagging, subscriptions and recommendations, Salesforce Content lets users manage their documents and unstructured data directly in the Salesforce application and improve productivity and effectiveness across the board.
 
And Salesforce Ideas brings “the wisdom of crowds to businesses” by letting online communities to submit, discuss and promote ideas. It’s the application behind salesforce.com’s own live community IdeaExchange and the Salesforce-powered Dell IdeaStorm.
 
Emovendo, a vendor of online customer acquisition technologies, has announced the availability of PageVester for salesforce.com’s AppExchange marketplace. PageVester helps marketers create, via a single interface, free landing pages with Google Page Creator and add Web-to-Lead forms.
 
Combined with Salesforce for Google AdWords, marketers have clear visibility over their campaigns’ effectiveness. It’s built on the Force.com platform. The announcement was made today at Dreamforce ‘07, salesforce.com’s User and Developer Conference.
 
With PageVester, marketers can create landing pages with Google Page Creator and fill the gap between their Google AdWords campaigns and Salesforce with a couple of clicks and without IT involvement. This mashup combines the functions of three applications: Google Page Creator, Salesforce Web-to-Lead and Salesforce for Google AdWords. The combination of these applications allows marketers to easily create landing pages, generate leads in Salesforce and track exactly which leads are generated by which ads and through which keywords.
 
“Too often, the implementation of an appropriate Web-to-Lead strategy requires IT involvement and is very time and budget consuming which is a major obstacle,” said Alexandre Pelletier, founder and CEO at Emovendo. “PageVester is meant for those marketers that need to activate Web-to-Lead functionalities and track their marketing campaigns with minimal resources.”
 
And Informatica Corporation , a vendor of data integration software, announced its newest addition to Informatica On Demand services at salesforce.com’s Dreamforce conference, Informatica Data Quality Assessment for Salesforce.
 
The tool uses pre-defined rules to analyze account, contact, lead, and opportunity information in Salesforce in order to identify missing, invalid, and duplicate data. It “identifies inaccurate data so that companies may take further action in correcting false or missing information,” company officials say.
 
This software-as-a-service application is delivered by Informatica, and requires no installation of hardware or software by the customer. The service is available via a 30-day trial at http://www.informaticaondemand.com beginning October 6, 2007.
 
“Bad data is a universal challenge that plagues all application customers regardless of size,” said Ron Papas, general manager, Informatica On Demand. “By using Informatica Data Quality Assessment, every salesforce.com customer and business user can qualify data — without having to make a significant investment in IT support or maintenance to handle this task.”
 
Yes, friends, there is CRM life outside of Dreamforce: SAS, a CRM business intelligence vendor, has announced the SAS Real-Time Decision Manager to help marketers “coordinate interactive marketing across multiple channels.” The product, part of SAS’ customer intelligence suite, uses analytically-driven decision logic and ships in December 2007.
 
Calling it “predictive analytics applied in real-time,” SAS officials say the product “is designed to provide the intelligence that drives the personalized experience.” When it receives a decision request from an operational system, it combines all available customer data with SAS Analytics and business logic in real-time “to determine the best response for the customer, such as making a recommendation on a customer’s eligibility to receive a particular offer.”
 
It can also score a customer’s propensity to buy a certain item, or calculate a customer’s credit worthiness based on the latest transactional information.
 
For example, a customer calls a financial institution to check his account balance and inquire about the minimum balance necessary to avoid a penalty. Based on this new input and the customer’s past behavior and transactional history, the decision flow determines that this customer has a high probability of leaving for a competitor.
 
But other factors indicate that his profitability is above average and he shows great potential for future returns. Based on this, the decision flow returns a recommendation to make an offer that will increase the probability of retaining this customer. Thus is the call center representative armed with the best possible information to act upon.
 
CRM vendor Infor has announced a partnership with Teradata, a division of NCR Corporation, in which Teradata will license the Infor CRM Epiphany Inbound Marketing product and deliver it as a component of the Teradata Customer Relationship Management (CRM) portfolio.
 
The result is what Infor officials call “a data warehouse-driven CRM product that enables personalized, relevant offers to customers via online, call center and in-store channels.” The product will be marketed as Teradata Next Best Activity.
 
Infor CRM Epiphany Inbound Marketing is part of a closed-loop CRM product set from Infor that also includes Sales, Outbound Marketing and Service, and provides analytics and personalization capabilities. Teradata Next Best Activity merges these inbound capabilities with customer information, from historical and real-time interaction data, to provide a 360-degree view of the customer.
 
Teradata, a division of NCR Corporation, sells enterprise data warehousing, analytic applications and data warehousing services.
 
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